The NBA’s Best Fans — and the Franchise that Takes Them for Granted

In politics, the rule is simple: dump your worst news on Friday, the later the better. As for holiday weekends, the preceding Fridays are littered with the disclosures of countless matters with which you’d never want your name associated. The Warriors — luckless in all other matters — finally caught a break with the timing of the Flunkster Dude story. Memorial Day weekend has come and gone, however, and many fans continue to seethe about the disclosures of last week. The franchise may try to “no comment” the comment story into oblivion, but the anger over the Warriors’ (mis)treatment of their fans doesn’t appear likely to disappear anytime soon.

By now it’s clear that anonymous posting from within the Warriors organization didn’t stop with Flunkster Dude on warriorsworld.net. Individuals posting from the Warriors’ corporate IP address made a few brief appearances here on Fast Break as well. Before breaking those comments down, however, two follow-up stories on last week’s revelations are worth reads:

First, warriorsworld.net has posted a full account of the Flunkster Dude comments. They’re a fascinating revelation of the things that triggered responses from Warriors’ headquarters. Criticism of Cohan’s willingness to pay to field a winning team is a common source of consternation. Pitches for single game tickets make a few appearances. The later posts directly target two frequent critics of the team, Tim Kawakami and Matt Steinmetz. Taken individually, they’re laughable in their naked PR boosterism. Most of the comments provoked heaps of scorn from the warriorsworld.net community at the time, even before the source was revealed. Taken as a whole, the comments are mostly puzzling. What material here couldn’t have been handled through official statements (other than a nice dig about the drama Nelson always brings)? Why wasn’t the team spending its energy engaging on these issues publicly — through Cohan, Rowell, Mullin, Nelson, Ridder, Thunder, anyone — instead of anonymously wrestling with the gripes of posters on an internet forum?

Second, John Ryan here at the Merc writes the obit for “We Believe.” Paul Wong consolidated every trait the Warriors could hope for in a fan: unwavering faith, an entrepreneurial spirit to share his excitement with others, and the dedication to put his own time and money behind the team. In return for all that and a slogan infinitely better than the Rowell-brainstormed “Great Time Out,” Wong couldn’t even coax a “thank you” out of management. The Warriors eagerly promote the fact that they have “the League’s best fans.” Thanks to their inexplicably adversarial actions, they’re now down at least one. Wong won’t be the last one out the door.

Which brings me to the Warriors’ comments on Fast Break. Based upon the IP addresses kindly provided to me by warriorsworld.net, I turned up three comments from addresses tracing back to Warriors’ HQ. Again, just because an IP address comes from inside the Warriors’ headquarters does not mean that Raymond Ridder or another Warriors employee wrote the comment. That said, the content is entirely consistent with what we’ve seen before:

I have to tell you, that you’re WAY off base on almost your whole article here. I want to go through this with you point to point.

1. I agree, they could do a little more on the history, except most of the Warriors fans weren’t alive during the championship!

2. Haltime Entertainment, I could agree as well, but you fail to realize the kids basketball teams at half-time and the free throw set up for kids after games are not something they get to do for FREE! Those are set up through schools or organizations that have purchased tickets to the game.

3. Thunder: Why are you worried about it? Also, he hasn’t changed his outfit for at least 4 years! I don’t know why you’re saying he’s different and more ridiculous each year.

4. Agree, get better food.

5. Warriors girls: Have you seen them? I don’t know how they couldn’t be there for dance.

6. Retire Mullin’s Jersey: Be patient I don’t see why this wouldn’t happen.

7. $10 seats: I don’t know if you’ve noticed but those seats are $15 now. When they were $10 they’re always sold out! If you make them $5 that doesn’t do anything but make a higher demand for something that there isn’t enough supply.

8. How is selling playoff tickets at all “dangerous?”

In retrospect, be a fan! Don’t spend so much time on complaining! This was one of the best seasons we’ve had in a long time and I went to one of the best sporting events I’ve ever been to and after the season you’ve written an 8 bullet point blog to complain. Come on now.

DUBFan was immediately mocked by loyal blog curmudgeon/truth speaker “Chris Cohan” and reminded by “q00pster” of the literal stampede that resulted from the poorly organized playoff ticket sale. DUBfan then dropped by again to sum things up:

DUB Fan says:
June 21st, 2007 at 3:00 pm edit

I sure as heck know people opened up their wallets for playoff tickets, but as far as I’m concerned most of the transactions occured on the INTERNET!

What do you expect the Warriors to do to take away the fact that people are excited about getting tickets to playoff games they haven’t seen in over a decade?

Finally, on August 9, 2007, I wrote a post called “the Mullin Doctrine,” attempting to connect the dots of Mullin’s moves into some semblance of a plan. With a normal franchise, you don’t need fan bloggers giving coherence to your general plan — those are usually matters team officials are happy to set straight for the media and fans, if only for putting other decisions in the proper context. For the Warriors, however, we’re all left to do our best reading from the tea leaves. Apparently my efforts at seeing order in chaos pleased the powers that be and provoked a completely unrelated shot at my Merc colleague Tim Kawakami:

tahoewarrior says:
August 10th, 2007 at 10:30 am edit

Suggestion to the Merc …. less Kawakami, more Lauridsen. Please….

The story of Warriors IP addresses appearing on my computer ends there, but with an epilogue. On August 12, 2007, I posted a follow-up to a critical comment I received regarding the August 10 post. That comment from “TC Firehouse” did not come from a Warriors’ IP address but took me to task for calling Cohan cheap. I noticed that the supporting evidence — a list of players receiving fat contracts from Cohan — had appeared in a warriorsworld.net interview with Warriors broadcaster Bob Fitzgerald in exactly the same order. Possibly a coincidence, but made more intriguing by the fact that the same list of names showed up here a few hours before the interview went up on warriorsworld.net. I wrote about the potential connection at the time — and comments from the Warriors’ IP address haven’t graced the blog since (although I trust that many of the Warriors’ more tech-savvy employees would know that a home IP address would shelter them from detection should they decide to drop by to defend their employer).

Ultimately, I’m not particularly perturbed by visits from inside Warriors’ HQ. As I wrote last week, when you have an anonymous forum, the content is what matters. I think the content of the messages above speaks for itself. And, unfortunately, so do the Warriors’ current actions. Met with a surge of fan disapproval following last week’s events, there are two straightforward, common sense responses:

Apologize. It doesn’t need to be long, fancy, or overly dramatic, but at least some of the team’s most die-hard fans feel betrayed by this entire situation. Just like Paul Wong eventually only wanted a “thanks” for all of his hard work supporting the team, fans would like at a minimum an “our bad” statement from the Warriors’ management regarding the situation. Raymond Ridder absolutely did the right thing by owning up to his comments, but it now looks like the posts stretched beyond Ridder. A good manager would not let this type of unrest and dissatisfaction among his customers go unanswered. From Cohan and Rowell, however, we’re left with “no comment.”

Open up. As I wrote before, the season ticket holder conference call was a good idea in concept, and even worked in practice with a few questions. It was, however, unquestionably an event to sell more season tickets. While the output had the potential to be a step in the right direction, the Warriors shouldn’t be expecting awards for their motivations. What the team needs to do — and by team I mean Chris Cohan and/or Robert Rowell — is sit down with an on-the-record, face-to-face, follow-up-questions-and-all interview with its toughest critics: not the paid media, but those who love the team enough to sink their own time, money and effort into obsessively writing about them on the internet. Start with the guys from warriorsworld.net, since those in the franchise cared enough about what they think to repeatedly post there. Get Geoff Lepper and the guys from Golden State of Mind in the building. I’d gladly show up with some of the regular readers from this blog if there’s room at the table.

If the Warriors want to set the record straight without all that famed “media distortion,” then set it straight — with the fans — on the record. If you don’t want to be saddled with endless speculation, provide answers to questions from your toughest critics. You may not win over anyone — and since this is the Warriors we’re talking about — the entire effort might just make things worse. But at the very least those in charge would be standing behind what they’ve created and are now aggressively trying to sell. The Warriors are a product in need of a credible endorsement. Those at the top of the team don’t have trouble with the sales pitch, but they’re now utter failures in the credibility department. To begin to rebuild that credibility will take something currently unimaginable in the Cohan/Rowell era: open, frank and direct engagement with those most likely to make them uncomfortable.

Adam Lauridsen

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When I express my opinion about what I think DN, Rowell and Cohan will do, that doesn’t mean I agree with it or am supporting it. I’m just guessing what I think they’ll do.

The fact is, it will be difficult to trade SJ and CM and JC after he opts in. And no respectible GM is going to give us young proven talent for that trio unless there is a big catch, say Bosh on the last year of a deal.

I’ve said many times I thought we should have kept the players from our playoff team together for a few years, and tried to build /upgrade that squad. Cohan should have paid the lux tax as a thank you to fans for decades of support despite losing teams. Make the playoffs for a few years, let the older players contracts expire and then rebuild around the younger players.

Once we got rid of most of our core of vets including BD, JR, AH, Pietrus, and Barnes, I thought we should go young, centering around ME, AB, BW, AR, AM, MB, KA, RT and adding draft picks. Even if that means having 30 win seasons, and getting higher picks. Unload the older players for cap space and build around a young core. I think that’s our best option right now.

But we’re not going to do what I think we should do. And the FO has screwed up that option by taking on JC, CM, and extending SJ and extending Nelson.

So now we’re screwed.

Nelson and Riley will trade our young talent for rent a vets. That’s what I think they will do.

The Oracle

Careful Cohan, You don’t want to be the axxhole that got kicked off two boards in one week for being a constant jerk do you?

Cohan wrote:

(insert jab at other posters here}

The Oracle

Son of A,

One of my favorite sports movies, North Dallas Forty.

“We’re not the team, we’re the equipment” “They’re the team” referring to the GM and Ownership.

How true. The “team” wants to make money. They don’t know how to put a championship team together. Nelson can’t help them in that area. Mullin was the only one that was starting to get a clue how to do it until bobby overruled him.

#387 wrong use of patronizing.
And yes I know I’m being patronizing.
The NBA salary rules suck – it means you make a bad signing or 2 and you suck for years.
Too many guaranteed long term lucrative contracts.
What was the thinking behind signing Maggette when we already had Harrington and Jackson and had drafted Wright and Randolph.
We lost Baron and then Rowell decided he’d win at something.
Only he lost.
Is a loser.
Needs to be fired.
Have I said that before?
Plus he’s so damn sour in the press conferences.
He should be selling corporate real estate.
Or working for AIG.

gsreject

its a tater truck earl… a tater truck…..

Common Sense

haven’t bothered to read many of these comments, especially the long winded apologists, but I’m willing to wager the comment count will hit 1,000 before the Warriors make a smart move. Any takers?

The Oracle

My theory of why the W’s are consistently out of the playoffs is that they don’t keep their better players, or trade them for equal value.

Some would argue that the W’s just draft poorly, given all the times they’ve ended up in the lottery. But a recent study published on ESPN shows that the W’s over the past 20 years have the 11th best draft record overall in drafting players, based on the expected and actual value of the picks they have had and the players they got. I think many would be surprised to see the W’s 11th best overall. Their grade C+.

This further confirms my belief that the W’s problem over the past decades is not poor drafting. They’ve done better than most teams in this area.

The reason we are consistent NBA doormats is that we don’t keep the good players we get, or are not able to trade them for equal value.

For example, Dunleavy and Murphy for SJ and AH is an example of getting equivilent value for players. We can argue which team got the better deal, but the trade is fair.

Letting JR go BW and a trade exception we didn’t use is an example of not getting equal value, trading a proven NBA talent (with faults and a big contract) for an uproven NBA talent and a trade exception our cheap owners wouldn’t use.

Letting BD go to another team without getting anything back is another example.

Letting Pietrus go without anything in return (Pietrus was a top 10 pick) is another.

Trading AH for a player JC that after one season Nelson already doesn’t want, and is eager to let go for nothing, will probalby turn out to be another trade of unequal value.

And these are just some of the moves made in the most recent years. The W’s have a bad habit of letting good players walk. Other teams/GM’s always try to get something good for their talented players.

BD, JR and AH, for all their faults outlined on this board, with 3 of the starting 5 of our one and only playoff team in the last 14 years. None of them were at the end of the careers from an age standpoint, in NBA terms all could be considered to have been in their prime when we had them. What return did we get back for for these 3 proven NBA starters that formed 3/5th of our one and only playoff team?

The answer to that question, imo, is not much to nothing, and that in a nutshell is the “secret” to how the W’s seem to get good players but miss the playoffs for decades at a time.

Otis

Oracle #417.
Solid post.
Laid out like that it’s hard not to see how we’ve been had over and over again. The main thing is that we’ve gotten LESS athletic through our transactions.
Barnes, Pietrus, JRich and Baron were athletes. Fast, strong, coordinated.
BWright, Maggette, Crawford, and Bells are less so.
The Magic and Lakers have athletes everywhere.
Hell, I might rather have Josh Powell than Maggette.

Otis

I’d keep Monta if he’d commit himself to playing defense. He can do it. He was pretty good at D when he was a rookie. But now he doesn’t seem to recognize it as part of the job. If he won’t play all out at both ends he should be traded.
But maybe that’s part of the no-D plan.
Keep the stats high enough to earn some love, but suck at D so you get traded to a better team.

jsl

Aside to CC (the human version, not Rowell’s puppet): Nice, pithy patches on this thread. But your best, I’d say, is your D-Day entry on your blog — chriscohansucks@blogspot.com — which is just a terrific, over the top, shiv job on our beloved FO and the print press which largely act as shills for the Cohan-Rowell loonies.

AlOha and JamesOnline: Always thinking; always on point. Best analyses on the thread. (JOL — please go to Vegas in the Summer — apologies to Kansas.)

My name is the link, anyone who wants to come lob insults at me with no obscenity screens.

overton j’anthony

do you think we could trade monta and get the #2 pick. the warriors dilemma is that they need a point, but having monta on the roster limits the PG options b/c they need someone big enough to guard the 2. trading monta would really open up the PG options. maybe monta will grow as a player, but at this stage all he brings is highly efficient scoring and nothing else. the dubs don’t really need any more scoring, so i think he’s pretty expendable. the questionn is how much did his value go down last year. could we trade him for the pick that would land us rubio? would we need to throw in our #7 or wright or something?

Al Oha

Monta ……………………………. is NOT the problem.

john

This is either very sad or laughable, or both. I found on the web an email I sent to Gary St. Jean on the Warriors website about how bad the team was and what it was going to do to get me back in the fold. A warning. It may bring tears of frustration

You see I’m cursed with knowing the franchise since they won their world championship. I’ve watched them ever since, hoping for a repeat. However, several years ago, I stopped going to games. I want to start buying tickets again but I’m leery about a team that loses two out of three games every year.
Give me some hope!
John

The past few years have been very tough on this franchise and the fans. With that said, we feel we are on the right track here to getting the franchise back to a high degree of respectability and competing at a high level on a consistent basis. The addition of our rookie class last year was a big step, but they also know there is more progress to be made. That’s why all three of them have been at our practice facility this summer working to become better players. Since the day we drafted Antawn Jamison he has shown us a commitment to working on making himself a complete player. I remember Dean Smith once telling me that every summer he asked Antawn to come back with a new skill for the next season, whether that was to become a better post-player or to become more of a leader. And every summer he came ready with that new skill. Antawn has done the same thing here with the Warriors. I could go on about our entire roster – and we’ll add some new players….

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